politics

New court documents reveal that Russia is keeping a very, very long list of influencers to spread its propaganda.

The Russian disinformation plot revealed in a Justice Department indictment this week may just be the tip of the iceberg, according to newly unsealed court documents.

On Wednesday, the DOJ announced it would seize 32 internet domains linked to a larger Kremlin scheme to promote disinformation and influence the 2024 election. The Russian campaign, known as Doppelganger, uses AI-generated content to create “fake news” boosted through social media with the aim of electing Donald Trump. 

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Of particular note, the documents released Wednesday included an affidavit that noted a Russian company is keeping a list of more than 2,800 influencers world wide, about one-fifth of whom are based in the United States, to monitor and potentially groom to spread Russian propaganda. The affidavit does not mention the full list of influencers, but is still a terrifying indicator of how deep the Russian plot to interfere in U.S. politics really goes.

Curiously, the agrarians, ur-Americans of Southern Protestant extraction, were influenced by the leading figure of the French Counter-Enlightenment, the arch-reactionary ultramontane Catholic Joseph de Maistre. Even in the present day, a Southern apologist for slavery has written a screed for something called the Abbeville Foundation extolling Maistre’s hatred of republics. Evidently, despising the very governmental foundation of the United States has become fashionable for a certain type of reactionary conservative.

Émile Faguet, a French author and critic, called Maistre “a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of pope, king and hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest and most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner."

Maistre hits many of the key themes of American conservatism: religious dogmatism, belief over evidence, anti-scientism, the imperative of obedience to hierarchy and a habitual brooding over violence.

The author then continues on to wealth accumulation.

Wiki Link https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_de_Maistre

It is easy to forget how tuned the Internet is at capturing attention and what kind of motivation is behind it. https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc

Tenet Media is no more.

The conservative media network folded Thursday night, just one day after the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment accusing it of being funded by Russian state-controlled media, according to Tenet Media field reporter Tayler Hansen.

The indictment accused Tenet and its founders of receiving nearly $10 million from employees of Russia Today as part of “a scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement.

New voter registrations surged among Black women and young people in Pennsylvania when Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president, according to newly released data.

In the week that Joe Biden announced he would not run for re-election, new registrations increased by 262 per cent among Black women under 30 compared to the same week in 2020.

Registrations among Black voters increased by 110 per cent, and among voters under 30 years old by 59 per cent, also compared to the same week in 2020. 

All of those demographic groups lean heavily towards voting for Democrats.

Conservative media is facing a rare moment of introspection, rocked by a series of scandals that have drawn new scrutiny to the right's favorite influencers.

If any voters had forgotten that Donald J. Trump was accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct, he spent roughly 45 minutes reminding them on Friday, eight weeks before Election Day.

At a lectern in the lobby of Trump Tower, Mr. Trump, flanked by seven of his lawyers, laid out years-old allegations from the women in detail as he denied that they were telling the truth. He had just attended a federal appeals court hearing related to a civil case in which he was found liable of sexually abusing and defaming a New York writer, E. Jean Carroll, decades earlier. Mr. Trump was not required to attend the hearing, but decided he wanted to.

When the hearing was over, he went to his eponymous building for what the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign called a “press conference.” But he ended it without taking questions, and the session — during which Mr. Trump criticized his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, for avoiding reporters — was more like a venting exercise over his frustrations about his legal travails.

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While promoting the interview on X, Carlson praised Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.”

Article is actually kinda thin, to be honest. But the couch-fucker gets clicks, I guess.

How you can say something like that and not be run out of politics is stunning, but that’s how far we’ve fallen. Dude also was addicted to porn booths in the 90s.

But evangelical leaders warn that’s no guarantee their rank and file will stay involved in politics if Republicans abandon socially conservative issues, like abortion and gay marriage, even as they lean in on others, like banning transgender kids from participating in youth sports. In July, Trump nearly sparked a platform fight at the Republican National Convention over language that couched abortion as primarily in the hands of the states, a position anti-abortion advocates almost uniformly oppose.

We can only hope that he continues to piss them off and they abandon him.

It wouldn't be fair to have your felony conviction negatively impact your opportunities. This is how justice works right?